Old home renovation includes demolition

Wednesday

Feb 6, 2013 at 11:26 AMFeb 6, 2013 at 11:30 AM

Cynthia Grau

The demolition of the home at 311 S. Mill St. Monday morning piqued the curiosity of many people in Pontiac as to what was going to happen to the lot.Ken and Barb Ehresman of Pontiac and owners of ATR have purchased both the home that was demolished, as well as the home next door, which they are in the process of restoring and refurbishing.Ken Ehresman said that he and his wife have a soft spot for old homes and they weren’t even planning on buying the home until they walked through it and fell in love.“When you’re in the old houses, they just have so much character and the first house that Barb and I ever bought was also an old house, you just have a soft spot in your heart for them and we’ve just reached a level now that we can actually put time and resources into restoring and remodeling,” he said. The home that is being restored is known throughout the area as the Jenkins House. It was built in 1895 and the Ehresmans are intent on restoring it to its original grandeur, with the project already well under way.“It’s an older, historic home and we’re going through the process of updating and renovating it and the house next door we knew was going to come on the market and it was an older house, too. To us, we have a soft spot in our hearts for them and we wanted to restore this one and bring it back to its former glory and it needed a bigger lot,” Ehresman said.Ehresman says the home has a kitchen, half bath, dining room, foyer and two formal sitting rooms, as well as four bedrooms upstairs and a full walk-up attic. He said the only major change that will be happening is one of the bedrooms will be converted into a bathroom.“In regards to restoration of the house, we’re trying to sympathetically restore and keep all the original components of the house that we can and put everything back to it’s original configuration. For example, sometime in the 60s, the staircase was kind of reworked and closed in and so we’ve basically reopened the entire staircase up and we’re rebuilding that to go back to the way it was when the house was first built, so our intention is to update it with modern wiring, plumbing and kitchen, but still keep all the character of the house and renovate all of the character,” he said.Ehresman also said that the couple is about four months into restoration and the entire project should be finished sometime this summer or fall.As for the new empty lot sitting next door, the plan is just to leave it as mainly yard space.“We maintained a little of the concrete driveway and there’s a concrete slab in the back that we’d like to be able to put an add-on garage. We’ve merged the two lots together,” he said. “After bigger houses were built and the town got more crowded, they would subdivide the lots and put up more houses, so in this particular case, that other house was coming back on the market and we thought it would be a better use of the corner and it would look better and the house would be more presentable if we ended up demolishing the other house and expanding the yard and going in that direction.”Ehresman also said that, since house walks are popular in the area and the home is in an historic part (of town), when work is done, he and his wife are entertaining the idea of opening the home to tours for special events.